"And so I did walk around it, and I looked at all the things that it was, how it looked, and how its shoulders were, and how its legs were and tried to see what kind of animal this was, and eventually I feel I did understand it, its meaning, the how of its meaning." (Ted Berrigan, 'The Business of Writing Poetry' in 'On The Level Everyday')

I used this as part of yesterday's talk & a colleague attempted to translate it into pedagogy-speak (cognitive strategies etc.) missing the point entirely. Not just that Berrigan would be utterly resistant to such theoretical language, but that the statement as it stands is so much better. The way, for instance, he plays with his reader: what kind of beast is being described? The development of each clause that enacts a stage of feeling discovery. And then the deliberate ungrammaticality of 'how' turned substantive. Simultaneously defining as enacting the astonishment of poetic meaning.

To say it in other words is to diminish the language. And this, sadly, is what is happening within education. A feeble, abstracted, dead & deadly discourse is poisoning creative thinking and teaching. Managerialism that thinks, perceives and evaluates only what it understands - a law of ever-diminishing returns. And in such stark contrast to the vitality of Berrigan's prose, through whose syntax the life-blood of human feeling and imagination flows.

In these dark days, never did poetry seem so vital.